Apartment hunting in the countryside

You’ll pay extra, but that river view is fantastic

In 2012, the construction was only beginning its invasion of our countryside campus.

Yuzixi International Community is a nearly completed condo development across the street from the school.Our tour guide walked us through an active construction site to the show apartments. We were provided with booties, right, for cleanliness.The show apartments were way classy.

The area around the New School has been subject to intense development over the past two years. What was once hilly countryside has been levelled, and is now home to luxury condos!

The afternoon that we made our fourth year official, in the mood for adventure, we took a detour to the “Yuzixi International Community” across the main road from the school. We were actually drawn by a sign advertising a bar/restaurant, which turned out to be just for show, but the management office had a scale model of the planned finished development and an army of helpful young women selling condos. So we joined a tour.

“Are you looking to buy today?” our guide asked us as we rode the golf cart across the grounds to the model apartments. She didn’t seem too bothered that we weren’t. The show condos were on the 7th-ish floor, in a building that was still actively under construction. (It was hard to keep count, as some of the flights of stairs were actually make-shift ladders.) But the apartments themselves were beautiful.

A luxury apartment on the outskirts of a prefecture-level city in China will run you between 780,000-1,280,000 RMB, we found, depending on the size. (That’s US$125,468-$205,897.) The larger apartment has two master bedrooms and one small bedroom — perfect for a couple, their parents and their one kid.

The most surprising thing about our visit was discovering that, if we stopped traveling and just saved for a few years, we could actually afford a down payment. It’s really more space than we need, though, so we probably won’t.